


here is the deepest secret nobody knows

by nagia



Series: exactly the crisis of faith [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (2017)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Pre-Het
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-07 18:58:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11065116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagia/pseuds/nagia
Summary: Frank actually stares at her.  He looks around the diner, then back to her.  Gives her the sort of slow blink she's learned means he's not just surprised but actually startled.  "Elaborating would be great.  Like, why you need a kid, to start, and if you need a particular six year old, or any boy'll do."OR: Karen Page sees a very familiar looking boy in a Captain America museum exhibit.  The facts are weirder than she expected.





	1. The one with, uh, the gingersnaps?

**Author's Note:**

> I have a job and I just finished the first story in this, so, yay, posting now. Also, I apparently have kind of a thing for bringing Kevin Page back to life. I'm not even gonna lie.

"Kevin! We don't run in museums; we walk!"

And for a moment, Karen could be twelve years old, at the Vermont History Museum, Kevin racing ahead to look at the Revolutionary War exhibits, lamenting that there was no Captain America, while her mother called futilely after him. She snaps out of it, of course. She's turning thirty soon. She's in New York.

This is a Captain America exhibit, and her parents are six hours away, raising the child they'd adopted a few years ago to replace her and her brother. Not, of course, that her mother had admitted as much in the email. But that's where they are, and what they're doing.

Karen notes the woman out of the corner of her eye, though. The slender frame, the loose, natural curls, the bleached-bone shade that some blondes get when they age. The boy she's calling after, all brassy ringlets bouncing over the collar of an Avengers tee shirt.

It's a vague resemblance to her own family of many years ago. But she puts them out of her mind. Focuses, instead, on the transcribed war journals. She waits her turn — behind four children and three adults — to step up to the diorama and turn the knobs, slowly winding through copied pages. There's a blurb on the kiosk next to it, but Karen pays it no mind. 

People are so much more complicated; no blurb could ever hope to explain a journal.

A few still lifes, though not many. A few journal entries, though much has been redacted — sometimes, apparently, by Captain Rogers himself, judging by the inkblots and the crossouts. A lot of portraits. Steve Rogers sketched hands, and profiles. The curve of a closed eye, lashes curling against an anonymous cheek. A dancing monkey made of short, jerky, furious-looking lines.

She turns the wrong way as she leaves the diorama.

She knows the slope of that forehead, the set of the brow. And behind him, when Karen looks up, is her mother. Older now, of course. In her brief glance, she sees deeper crows' feet etched into the corners of her eyes, so many more fine linees. But she makes a point to move on, because even if this woman is her mother, even if Karen is sure, then this is still impossible.

Her mother could not have given birth to a third child. They adopted.

Could she? Didn't they?

"See, Kevin? This is Captain America's journal," her mother says. "You used to take art classes to be like him."

The urge to whip around, to grab Kevin by the arm and take him far, far away from whatever the hell her mother is doing, rises. Her hands shake with it.

Her heels click and squeak against the marble floor as she walks away. Trai-tor, trai-tor, trai-tor. Or maybe Kev-in, Kev-in, Kev-in.

* * *

She goes to Foggy first. She feels like a bug in the upscale law office, with the sleek lines of its furniture. The place looks like something right out of a glossy industrial-chic magazine, and she can't help thinking of Landman & Zack.

He agrees to see her immediately, at least, and she's almost surprised to realize that HC&B really, actually did give him a corner office. The view of the city out the wall of windows behind his desk would take her breath away if she didn't have too much else rattling through her head. It's like an aerial shot from a movie.

Foggy rises from behind his desk. His face lights up in the way she's only really seen it do for her and Matt. He's expecting good news, or at least something funny.

"Karen! What brings you to the big shot lawyer's office?"

She tries to smile back. From the way his expression darkens into something more serious, brow wrinkling down in worry, it's not a very good smile.

"Let's say my parents… I don't know. Adopted a kid? Maybe? Or maybe had a kid. I don't — I'm not sure on that part. And let's say they were calling this kid by, uh, by the name of somebody dead. And coaching him on how to be more like that person."

Foggy's expression has gone from worry to concern to, essentially, horror. "Jesus, Karen."

"That's pretty much what I thought, yeah. I was standing in a museum, and."

"And you're sure it's them? Not a case of mistaken identity? Life-model decoy thing? Wait, that's a little too tinfoil hat. Are you totally serious about this?" At her nod, he says, "And you want to know what your legal options are."

"I don't have any, do I?"

Foggy winces. "He's in New York right now? Because I know some people in CPS, and we can report suspected abuse or neglect. That's really about all I can do, Karen. It sucks, but unless you're planning to kidnap him —" He must see the moment where she seriously considers it, because he stops and says, "You're not — Karen! Stop thinking about kidnapping him! Wait, don't say anything, don't even nod. If you're planning on kidnapping him, don't tell me."

"Can I say I wanna report suspected abuse?"

His whole face brightens again. "I will work as much legal kung fu for you as I can. I promise. I'll work the kind of legal kung fu with the magical glowing fist. Who is a client of ours, now, and I can totally put you in touch —"

"I know how to get in touch with Danny Rand," she says. "He calls me Kay-Page."

"You're shitting me," Foggy says, and his personal assistant brings in coffee and they sit on the couch in his big shot corner office, staring out at the city and talking. Some of it's business, of course, but a lot of it is just shooting the shit.

She's not sure how much will happen, really, but she does leave feeling better.

* * *

Nothing comes of the CPS call. She hadn't really expected it to, but it still stings. Karen tries to set it aside, tries to focus on work and on the various shootings she's been following. But those words — _you used to take art classes_ — keep circling around in her head.

Does her mother seriously think that this new Kevin is — is the same child who died ten years ago? She can't stop worrying at it.

Eventually, she arranges to meet Frank at yet another all-night diner. This one's a little emptier, and Karen leans over the table, toward him, once they're settled with coffee.

"I need to kidnap a six year old boy," are the first words out of her mouth.

Frank actually stares at her. He looks around the diner, then back to her. Gives her the sort of slow blink she's learned means he's not just surprised but actually startled. "Elaborating would be great. Like, why you need a kid, to start, and if you need a particular six year old, or any boy'll do."

So she lays it out for him. Seeing her mother and brother in the Captain America exhbit at the Museum of the City of New York. The name. What her mother had said. Frank listens to all of it with the distant, measuring expression he'd worn in the diner when he'd used her as bait. He's being patient with her.

On the other hand, she feels kind of like an idiot for telling a man who'd lost both his children that she wants to steal someone else's child. Even if it's for a good reason. But if she's hurt him, brought back the pain that she's sure never really goes away, he gives no sign of it.

Eventually, she picks up her second cup of coffee in both hands says, "She emailed me a few months ago — after the Rand story, when I was on the front page — and told me that she and Dad had adopted a boy," Karen tells him. "But she didn't say his name. And she didn't say he'd be, that he'd be some kind of dead ringer for Kevin. Frank, something monumentally fucked up is happening here. I know it. And they were so… so shitty the first time around."

A long, thoughtful silence. Frank is on his third cup of coffee, and he takes long sips. Scrunches his nose like he doesn't like the taste.

"That's… yeah, fucked up's a word for it," he says at last. "You want me to dig into it? See what I can find, see if my guy turns anything up?"

"You'll do that?"

"I said it was fucked up. I ain't just gonna help you kidnap a kid. But I'll take a look." Frank finishes off his coffee, his whole face twisting, and then stands. "Same burner?"

"What? Oh. Yeah. Yeah, same burner."

"Get you an answer in a couple days." He leans in, Karen assumes to make sure only she can hear him, since the waitress has just appeared at the front of the diner with a coffee pot in hand, and says, "Try not to commit any felonies before then, Page."

He drops a pair of bills on the table and leaves. The utter lack of concern is kind of nice, she realizes. Matt or Foggy or even some of her co-workers would have stayed, would have made sure she had a safe way home. But Frank would rather be the first one out the door, would rather clear the area, and after that, he trusts her to get herself home. Trusts himself, trusts her.

She orders a stack of waffles, since Frank left way too much money for a pair of coffees, and covers them in butter and cheap syrup. No felonies. She can probably handle that.

* * *

Three days later, since she's awake at four in the morning and she literally cannot spend another minute peering through her father's church's website or the few pictures Windler County Elementary has online, she heads to the gym. She's running up the stairmaster, sweaty and gross and actually feeling kind of good about herself, when the burner she uses for Frank and the occasional work contact starts lighting up and vibrating with text after text.

fc // 4:47a  
No adoption records. Got three birth certificates for Kevin Paxton Page, father Paxton Maxwell Page, mother Penelope Schaffer Page, DOB's 3/20/1990, 3/20/1992, 3/20/2010

fc // 4:49a  
3/20/92 certificate is obvious fake. 1990 is probably real. 2010 is a better fake.

fc // 4:51a  
Kid's not enrolled in school or anything else. Not in any of the sunday school pictures. Think your parents are pretending to the outside world he doesn't exist.

fc // 4:52a  
Should take look in person. You in?

She takes a swig from her water bottle and texts back:

outbound // 4:53a  
I'm in. Meet where?

#

They meet at a diner on the edge of Hell's Kitchen. Before the Incident — really, no wonder Foggy hates calling it that; it really is so sanitized, and she's learned too well that violence doesn't sanitize away — it had been some kind of upscale restaurant. But almost nobody's insurance had covered 'attempted alien invasion,' and the original owners had sold it for cheap just for a chance to buy something somewhere else.

Sometimes she thinks it's perfect that she landed in Hell's Kitchen, a borough that only had room for her because of people willing to walk away from the trainwrecks their lives had become in order to make something better, something new. 

Sometimes she thinks she's projecting.

What Karen actually says, once she's paid for her coffee (and for the waitress to fill Frank's thermos; last time was on him, after all), is, "Oh my god, Frank. A van? An unmarked white panel van? That doesn't just scream 'kidnapper' to you?"

"It's not like I wrote 'free candy' on the side, Page, Jesus," he says. "And the only one I hear screaming is you."

"You are such an asshole," she says, but he just kind of grunts like that's fair. Then again, it is fair. He really is an asshole.

The drive is something like six hours. They spend most of it in silence. There's a couple of times they rehash their plans and confirm the address of her parents' house, and Frank slaps the 'scan' button at least once an hour, if not more, searching for an oldies station.

They roll into Fagan Corners at about two in the morning, when the only thing still broadcasting is a college radio station determined to play sleepy, atmospheric tracks that keep getting interrupted by bursts of static. Frank drives right by the town's only hotel, a bed and breakfast that's been around for at least eighty years, and Karen doesn't suggest stopping.

There's a light on in her father's office window at the Fagan Corners Church of Christ's Mercy, burning warm and yellow. Like a lighthouse, her father had said, when her mother rolled her eyes at the electric bill. She closes her eyes in relief for a second, and then leans forward in the seat, ready to guide Frank through the dark, twisting forest roads to her family's property.

The songs on the radio fade away into white noise the farther away from town the van gets.

It's only about a ten minute drive, but the forest turns thicker, denser, and the streetlights vanish. They're only five miles from the center of town, but it's three miles deep in the woods, and the Pages have always liked their privacy. There had been jokes about the Page house, back when she was in high school. About how it was haunted. How the Pages had kept monsters there.

She herself had woken in the night when she was a child, strangling beneath the weight of awful dreams and the sad realization that nobody knew. The realization that she could scream for hours and nobody would hear. 

There's no gate. The trees let up, creating a clearing, about a quarter of an acre out from the house. The property has a circular driveway — empty of any other cars — that the van seems to trundle up, kicking and spitting gravel around under its wheels, and the house itself is spacious. It had started out as a Cape Cod-style place, but as she looks up at the front walk, it still seems more like some Queen Anne monstrosity to her.

They shut the van doors as silently as they can. Karen heads over to the garage, long ago converted from a carriage house, and peeks in the windows. The glass itself is filmey, covered in dust on the inside.

No cars there, either.

And something looks wrong with the windows on the upper floors, though she can't quite pick it out.

"Place is deserted," she tells Frank, disappointed.

Frank doesn't even look away from his view in the first floor windows. He's staring at something intently, and then he asks, "You still have a key?"

She'd thrown it down on the floor by the front stair, the day she'd left. But she still has a bump key, and pretty soon they're in through a side door, what used to be the mud room. There are no rubber boots lying around now, though. No hats or gloves. From the mud room she heads into the kitchen, clicking on her flashlight.

The homey kitchen she remembers from her childhood, with its lacey curtains and open windows, is gone. She's not even sure she can identify what's replaced it. On every surface she sees electronics of some kind. A lot of it looks medical, but she sees at least four computer monitors. No computer towers, though, and no keyboards.

When she turns to look at Frank, he's staring at it all with an expression of faint disquiet. She sees it mostly in his eyes. He looks to her and raises an eyebrow.

"It wasn't like this ten years ago," she says. "What were they doing?"

Frank doesn't have an answer.

Glass crunches under their feet as they move out of the kitchen. The dining room doesn't look all that different, although Karen has a hard time looking away from boxes of broken china stacked in a corner. Her mother had loved that china. They'd used it every Thanksgiving, every Christmas. Who or what would dare to break it, and why wouldn't her mother have just thrown it out?

The living and front rooms are where the disquiet really starts to set in for her. She can actually feel her stomach start tying itself in knots.

Someone had strewn paper all over the floor and left it. They'd ripped the broom closet door off its hinges, too, and pulled everything out of it. She can't help the urge to drift over there, and her hands shake as she shines the flashlight inside it.

God, she can remember spending hours there. All the time she'd spent building up her spaceship in her head. She can almost hear her own voice, all bright and shiny in her childhood, saying the words — T-minus 5, T-minus 4 —

They'd taken a sledgehammer to the floor.

And Frank is right behind her, looking in with a furrowed brow. He asks, voice quiet but still seeming ungodly loud in the deserted house, "That your closet? The one with, uh, the gingersnaps?"

"It used to be," she says, and wonders when. Wonders why. She turns away from it, though. Grabs the first piece of paper off the floor that she comes across and holds it up to her flashlight's beam.

It's a printout of some sort. Jumbles of letters and blocks of color, repeating over and over. Although not quite repeating: different sequences of letter and color. But still, the same letters. The same colors. She drops it, and picks up another one, and her mouth goes dry when she sees the double helix. 

"DNA analysis?" Karen asks Frank.

"Looks like the pastor started playin' God," is Frank's reply. He kneels to pick up a few more pieces of paper. Karen realizes that she wouldn't be surprised if Frank were to suddenly tell her that he knew enough about genetics to tell her what they were looking at.

But he doesn't seem to, because he shuffles through them and then drops them again.

The living room is awash in medical equipment. Only it's not like any medical equipment she's ever seen. Empty cylinders connected to machines that don't seem to do anything. A few pieces of medical equipment she does recognize — a cardiograph, an EEG. A respirator. But all of it is lifeless. Useless. And Karen can't even begin to piece together what purpose they could have served.

The trip upstairs doesn't help. Her parents' bedroom door is closed, and she's almost terrified to open it, afraid of what she'll find. Who she'll find.

She opens the door to Kevin's room, and she doesn't even begin to know how to catalog the hurt. One of her hands is covering her mouth, holding back the ragged gasp before she can let it out. Because what should have been a teenaged boy's room looks like a fucking hurricane touched down in it. Someone had thrown the bed over, and overturned the desk, too. Heaved books off the bookshelves, and taken something heavy to the wood paneling along the walls.

And the problem with Kevin's window, she realizes, is that it doesn't match the rest of the house. It's new.

"Jesus Christ," Frank says, and she realizes that she's started to shake.

She turns around, marching out of Kevin's room, caught somewhere between tears and fury, and makes her way to her parents' room. She throws the door open and storms in, flashlight weaving bright patterns along the wall.

It's the only room that hasn't changed. A couple of the pillows are new, there's a different chaise in the far corner, new lamps on the bedside tables. But it's just the same as it had always been. Untouched by the insanity in the rest of the house.

And then Frank's voice, low but still alarmed, calling for her.

She finds him in her room. Only it's not her room anymore. Her bed, her dresser, her desk — all gone. Same for the few posters she'd been allowed. No more bookshelf, either. And in its place is yet another massive amount of medical equipment. This time, though, there's a functioning laptop. She taps a key on it, only to discover a lock screen.

"I got a guy," Frank says again. But his interest is clearly held more by the tank full of some murky red-brown fluid. He raps his knuckles on it, but the fluid doesn't move.

Karen points. The monitor next to the tank is host to a pair of long, flat lines.

"There was something alive in here?" He looks back down at the tank. And then he darts a look over his shoulder, toward the stairs. She can see it in his face: he's thinking back, putting together all the pieces. The three birth certificates. The boy they called Kevin. The broken window. The papers with the double helix. He comes to the conclusion the same moment she does.

Only Frank says it aloud.

"Fuckin' Christ, did they clone him?"

#

Karen has a couple of very quiet panic attacks in Frank's van. And then she starts thinking about where her parents would be, if they weren't here. Her father had never been particularly well off, although they'd always gotten by. She hadn't gone to the expensive basketball camp — and, in fact, her father had removed her from basketball entirely when she'd asked to go, because it wasn't ladylike — and Kevin had gotten cello lessons rather than guitar. And yeah, there had been a lot of nights they'd slept through dinner because their parents had eaten late and saw no reason to wait on them or apparently to wake them up.

There had been, Karen had realized when she started spending time with other kids, so many things that other kids had that they didn't. The only thing they had that everybody else didn't had been —

The cabin. That had been from her mother's side of the family. And few of the Schaffers attached to the cabin had bothered to stay in Vermont. They'd usd it in the summers, when she was a girl. Would they use it now?

"My family has this cabin," she offers, eventually. "But I don't — I'm not sure that's where they are. When I was — anyway, the access road had downed trees, and we usually had to hike in." 

Frank looks over at her, then back out at the road. The radio is slowly blooming from static back to music, although it's tinny and far away.

They turn, slowly, southwest, toward Lake Saint Catherine.

#

The drive takes a little under an hour, and Karen spends it trying to come up with some answer other than cloning. Frank has apparently given up on finding an oldies station, and has instead fed some godawful seventies funky disco tape into the tape deck. He's not precisely singing along — he's way too deep inside his own head for that — but every so often, he hums a bar as she navigates him toward the lake, and then along half-remembered rural roads toward the actual lakehouse.

There's a mailbox by the access road. It reads PAGE.

That's new. There'd never been a mailbox there. And worse still, the access road itself is unblocked, and they turn smoothly into it.

Frank kills the headlights, and he drives the van in an agonizingly slow crawl down the access road, toward the cabin. She wants to shake him, wants to yell. Wants to tell him to speed the hell up, tell him that this is taking too long and she's gonna go crazy.

He cuts the engine once they're in earshot of the house, coasts the rest of the way in on neutral. It's a nice trick, one she'll have to remember for later.

Frank doesn't speak before they leave the van. Apparently, from the moment he shut off the engine, they were on radio silence. But he does gesture to his side-arm and then point at her, clearly wanting to know where her gun is.

She rolls her eyes and digs her Llama-III and its holster out of the messenger bag she'd brought for the evening. She checks the magazine under his watchful eye, and then he nods, and they're both getting out of the van. She follows him out on his side, and he closes the door, miraculously soundless.

She heads toward the two other cars in the driveway. One is a Prius, clearly fairly new. The other is an aging Volvo. Karen shines her flashlight in the backseat of the Prius, but finds nothing. No indications whatever that a child has ever been in that car.

In the Volvo, however —

It's not just the booster seat. It's not the lidded cup left near it. There are soft books, some Fisher Price huge-headed figures. All the detritus that collects around kids.

Her parents are here. So is Kevin 2.0. 3.0? She's guessing that there'd been at least one other clone.

She turns to Frank, but he's staring down into the car, his expression stricken. She wonders, again, how it must feel. He'd lost both his children. Her parents had cloned the one they lost.

Strange, but it hurts, to know she's hurting him. And it hurts, too, to know that her parents could do this.

Frank jerks his thumb back toward the van. She follows him over. Once they're back inside it, he turns to her, and says, voice low, "Alright. We've confirmed location. How do you want your answers, Page?"

"Right from their mouths," she says, and her voice sounds fiercer than she can remember being about much else in her life. She's starting to get that wild, shaky feeling again.

Frank nods. He casts a glance back at the house, and then he sighs. "Wait here. Got a couple of trackers, gonna put 'em on the cars. Then we're finding a damn place to sleep. You been on this for days, I ain't slept in thirty hours. Not a good time to try and make real plans."

She waits while he's gone. He doesn't bother taking the flashlight with him, so there's no way to guess his progress, but within minutes he's back in the driver's seat. 

He starts the car. Karen hurriedly slaps the power button on the tape deck, and she navigates him away from the lake house and toward the cabin motel Google informs her still exists.


	2. For pretty much exactly the crisis of faith everyone in this goddamn room is having!

They end up in a cabin with a sofa and a loft bed. She's so exhausted by the time Frank unlocks the cabin door and flips on the light that she drops her shoes by the ladder. The sofa springs squeak a little as Frank settles into it.

She crashes for at least six hours, only waking when the sun is well up. She steps into the bathroom for a shower, because she's disgusting and she hadn't managed one before she fell asleep, and once she's dressed again, she finds Frank sitting up on the couch, cleaning his side-arm. Looks like a .45 to her, but she's not as practiced at guess-the-gun.

Her father had preferred bird guns. Her mother had been the one to insist she learn to shoot a pistol. Just in case.

He's keeping one eye on his phone, she notices.

"Prius left about three hours ago," he says. "Volvo's still sitting. How do you want this to end up, ma'am? Because I don't see 'answers' being the end of this."

No. It won't. Now that she's had time to sleep, time to step away from what she's been looking for and not finding, she can see it. It has to stop. She needs to know what happened to the first clone. And God knows she can't let them make another one, if something awful happens to Kevin 3.0. 

"They can't keep him. This… this clone, this child, they're trying to turn into Kevin," she says, gaining a little strength with every word. "They can't. And they can't keep cloning him. It's —"

Wrong. Disgraceful. Exactly the worst way to grieve. But she can't make those words come out. They're all stopped up by the lump in her throat. She remembers the chain link fence; she'll never forget it. She'll be seeing the off ramp and the chain link fence that had killed her baby brother every time she closes her eyes for the rest of her life.

There's no changing that.

Maybe it's weird and horrifying that she doesn't actually care that her parents are artificially creating human life. It's the insult to the real — the _original_ Kevin, the baby she'd held in her arms, the brother whose sandwiches she'd cut the crusts off of, that burns her up inside. Like he had been just a product of genetics, rather than a whole, unique person shaped by his experiences.

It's the damage they have to be doing to a six year old human child, holding him to a standard he can't possibly understand. Trying to make him be someone he can't possibly know how to be.

"Not a lot of places for a clone to go," Frank points out. "You gonna stick him in the system? Hand him over to SHIELD?"

She jerks where she sits, unaccountably hurt that he's asking either of those questions. "Of course not! God, Frank, can you even imagine what SHIELD would do to a clone? Even assuming they've got their — their HYDRA problem sorted out? He'd spend the rest of his life in some lab, or — no."

He doesn't even look at her. Just keeps his hands moving, fingers restless on the metal as he reassembles the .45 with all its springs and screws. He's waiting her out, she knows. He's good at that. His patience, his ability to wait without giving any sign he's waiting, to evaluate without telegraphing his conclusions, it isn't something he's ever bragged about or even admitted to.

But it's still probably one of his most dangerous qualities. Any idiot can be brutal. She's done brutal things, and she'd just been a scared secretary. But _patience_ — 

Patience is where the real devils lurk.

"You're a real asshole, Frank," she tells him. He doesn't bother to twitch in acknowledgment, and she heaves a sigh, running her fingers through her hair. Half to comb it into some semblance of order and half out of sheer frustration. "Do you want to hear me say it?"

His reply is a quiet, deceptively disinterested, "Think you need to say it."

She closes her eyes for a minute. Takes in a breath. Okay. 

"I'll take him. They — they need to — go wherever it is you go when you engage in human cloning. And they have to stop hurting him. But he's — he's just a kid. He's _not_ Kevin, but he is my brother. He doesn't belong in a lab, and he deserves better than foster care."

Frank sets the gun down and then turns to look at her. Another of those long, quiet, evaluating looks. "You think you can handle that?"

"I have no idea," she says, raw and honest. "But I'll make it work."

He shakes his head. "Not good enough, Page." And then he's staring at her again, his eyes like dark hollows in his face and his mouth in its usual grim line. "You do this, you walk out that door, you got a kid. You're gonna be making decisions, puttin' him first. His health, his happiness, his safety — you walk out that door, you're makin' those your top priority. If that's not something you can do, then don't start this."

Karen lets those words sit in the air for what feels like a long time. She absorbs, them, really. Thinks about what he's telling her. Really stops and considers whether or not she can do it.

"It's scary," she admits. "I'm going to make mistakes, it's going to be hard. But, yes, Frank, I can. I'll make it work. He's — he deserves that."

And she's not sure she could live with herself if she handed her own brother over to SHIELD.

He keeps up his stare and it feels like forever. Schoonover had said once that it was like he could look right into someone's soul, and she'd known just what he meant. She gets that impression now. That he's evaluating. That he sees her. That he's got as good a sense of her motivations as she does. 

After a while, he nods.

It's all decided.

* * *

They spend the next few hours coming up with a plan. They have to wait until dark falls. Karen passes the time fielding suspicious questions from Ellison and anxious ones from Foggy and catching cat naps between the chimes of her phone. The day drifts by, long and slow like summer always goes. The soft sounds of Frank cleaning his other guns lulls her off.

It should surprise her, that she can sleep with him around.

Eventually, she rolls out of the loft, strapping on her holster and following him to the van.

They drive back to the cabin. Both cars are there still. The light in the downstairs window is on. It's after nine o'clock, a reasonable bedtime for a six year old, but even approaching the house, Karen can hear the chatter of the downstairs television.

Jimmying a Volvo's rear passenger door open is easy. She gets it opened silently and cuts the seat belts holding in the car seat. Between her and Frank, they get the seat transferred to the back of the van and strapped in correctly in just under two minutes. Karen closes the car and van doors soundlessly, and then creeps up to the front door while Frank circles around.

She reaches into her bag for her ring of bump keys. It doesn't even take her a minute to find the right one, and then she's tapping the head of the key with her cell phone and turning at just the right time. The door opens almost soundlessly — certainly quiet enough that she doubts either of her parents hear it over CNN.

Shoulder holsters aren't the best for a standing draw, but Karen has her Llama out by the time she moves from the mud room into the living room. The cabin itself is mostly an open plan, on the first floor. The second floor is the master room, with a split loft for kids or guests to sleep in. At least, that's how she remembers it, and at least as far as the downstairs goes, she's right.

Living room, dining room, kitchen — they're all one big open space, separated only by the kitchen-island-slash-breakfast-nook.

Her father is standing up by the time she's finished clearing the first floor. He's stepped between her and her mother, his hands raised.

"Karen," he says, and his still has the sonorous, reasonable, _trustworthy_ voice that she remembers from her childhood. He's so good at _sounding_ fatherly. "Put the gun down. You don't —"

The kitchen door crashes open, because picking locks is beneath Frank, apparently. She supposes she should be glad he didn't shoot the deadbolt, or just break the window.

Her mother jumps, screaming a little, and Karen recognizes her mother's eyes. Big and blue and terrified. She sees them in the mirror more often than she'd like.

"I don't need the gun?" She cocks her head. The words come out bitter. "Tell me what all that medical equipment in my old room was for. Tell me what happened to Kevin's bedroom. If you _start talking_ , I'll put it away."

Her mother can't take her eyes off Frank. It's a pretty logical reaction, really, considering he's the one with the MRAD and he just busted her kitchen door down in one kick. But Frank isn't about to shoot anyone. Frank is the least threatening person in this room, and Karen could laugh and laugh about that.

"Through the grace of God, we found a way to save our son," Paxton Page says. His voice halfway rings off the wood-panelled walls, rich and deep as it had been when he gave his sermons. Rich and deep as it's always been, echoing down the halls of her memory.

Frank scoffs, or possibly snorts. It's a deeply derisive noise, anyway, made thicker and angrier because it rises from deep in his chest, rather than as a harsh breath down through his nose. "You mean you think you made him over again. You think, what, if you raise this one to be an almost-perfect copy, that'll mean… what? That your son never died? Tell me you don't seriously believe that shit."

"In everything the Lord has a purpose," Penny says. She yelps again when Frank's hands twitch on the MRAD.

It's her scientist mother parroting her father's fundamentalist bullshit that makes Karen snap, "What about the soul? Don't unconditional election and limited atonement kind of imply that each soul only gets one shot at not ending up in eternal hellfire and damnation?"

Paxton says, and his voice is so eloquently weary, and his face is so tired, "Karen, if these long years and the burden Christ has given me have taught me anything, it's that I can never know the state of my own soul, let alone anyone else's."

"The burden Christ gave you," Frank repeats, disbelieving. It brings back a vague memory — hadn't Matt been all bright-eyed over the fact that he and Frank had both been raised Catholic? She wonders if Catholics even have a concept of any of the Holy Trinity being involved enough in individual lives to challenge them.

But none of that matters right now. Her father takes a step forward — Karen drops her arms, aiming the Llama III directly at his chest — and holds his hands up. His face is more weathered than she remembers, backlit by the warm glow form the kitchen and cast in flickering half-brightness from the television screen. "We made mistakes, Karen. We know that, now."

"So you cloned Kevin just so you could, what, do better this time?" She can hear herself turning shrill. She doesn't care, because she can't fucking believe what she's hearing. "Jesus fucking Christ, Father."

Paxton flinches at the blasphemy, but he stands his ground. "That was how it started, yes. But now… Karen, he is just… Kevin. Our son. Your brother."

"I really wish I could believe that. But you kept him from me. From the world."

"The world isn't ready for human cloning," her mother says. She still hasn't taken her eyes off Frank.

"You mean it's illegal. Human cloning is illegal. For pretty much exactly the crisis of faith everyone in this goddamn room is having!"

"Will you _please_ stop taking the Lord's name in vain?" Her father asks, like that matters now. "We only hid him because the world isn't ready. And we knew — we knew you would be here, angry with us, if you knew. We just want to raise our son in peace."

"You mean you want to indoctrinate your son's clone into thinking and acting just like he did. Without whatever fatal flaw sent him off that overpass." She shakes her head and holsters her gun. "Not happening. He's going to get to live a normal life. He's going to get to be whoever he really is. And you're — you're both going to SHIELD. But before I go get him — tell me what happened to Kevin's room."

Paxton hangs his head. Her mother is the one to answer, soft and raw, with one hand rising almost to cover her mouth, "We used an artificial aging process. The clone's psyche — evidently couldn't… handle it. He had an identity crisis. Possibly a psychotic break. Then he lapsed into major depression, with a strong SI component. We tried anti-psychotics, anti-depressants. The fluoxetine — he —"

"He threw himself out that window," Frank says. "And you replaced it."

Penny seems to collapse in on herself, dropping her face into her waiting hand. Her palm covers her mouth, and her thumb rests right up against her nose.

It's a gesture Karen herself has made. Still makes, sometimes, when she's trying to hold everything back. When the world has gotten too cold and too hard and she can't talk about, or doesn't want to, and she's trying not to cry.

"Yes," her father says.

"And you replaced _him._ Made him again. From scratch, this time," she hears herself say, low and bitter, and she holsters the Llama III. "Both of you stay here. Frank, can you keep them here?"

Frank takes exactly one step forward and moves his arms just slightly. He shifts the MRAD's barrel just enough that it's against the side of her mother's head. The dark hollows of his eyes burn as he turns his gaze on Paxton.

"We only get once chance, with our children," he tells them all. "Nobody, no other kid, no fucking clone, could ever replace mine. The world doesn't come with a reset button. And I'd have to be completely fucked in the head to forget them, forget that. It'd be an insult to them, to see if I could _make copies_ , and then a crime to go breaking bones to fit their fucking coffins."

There's a very, very soft click. So soft she almost doesn't hear it. But she does. And if she does, then Paxton does, and she sees her father's grass-green eyes widen.

"Don't move," the Punisher says, and his voice is so soft and so ragged and there is not a person in the room who doubts that if Paxton or Penelope Page move, he will pull the trigger.

Her mother squeezes her eyes closed.

Karen goes upstairs.

* * *

Her parents had knocked down the wall that split the loft. What she remembers as separate bedrooms for her and Kevin is now a single loft room with a child's tiny bed. One part of the room, marked out by a rug with letters and numbers printed all over it, has been given over to what look like educational toys. There's a bookshelf crammed full in another corner, next to a little desk. She holds up her cell phone and reads by the light of the screen, noting a bunch of kids' math and science workbooks and a few children's Bible study books.

The desk's surface is perfectly clean.

Kevin had been more organized than she was. Her heart squeezes.

The boy himself — the clone, her younger brother — is fast asleep in his bed still. On the bedside table next to him is a bottle of children's Benadryl.

She hopes it's not to avoid the Page family nightmares. Not because she and Kevin hadn't been given anything to help, although they hadn't, but because she hopes that this Kevin has somehow escaped them. Maybe there's a chance they aren't genetic, even though she knows they run in her father's side at least two generations back.

The diphenhydramine works to her advantage: Kevin is bleary and confused when she turns on his bedside light and shakes him awake. He stares up at her blankly, and then furrows his brows.

"Hi, Kevin," she says, before he can open his mouth to start screaming about the stranger in his bedroom. "Is it okay if I sit down?"

He pauses, clearly thinking about it, and then gives her a grave, polite nod.

Karen smooths her skirt and sits down on the edge of his bed. "My name is Karen," she says. "And I'm your —"

"Big sister," is Kevin's immediate reply. "Daddy talks about you sometimes."

She forces herself to keep a polite, neutral expression. Showing her shock, or asking what the hell their father has said about her, won't help her. "Oh — uh. I'm, um, glad."

"Daddy said you went away to New York and you weren't coming back. We pray for your soul every night, just in case," Kevin tells her. His eyes are wide and blue. They'd both inherited their mother's eyes. Kevin got more of their mother in general, from her eyes to her brow to her curly hair.

He hadn't loved science, though. Father had been a philosopher, sort of. If she counted 'yelling in the pulpit and composing terrifying sermons' as philosophical searching. And Kevin — he'd been an artist. A musician, especially, but he'd loved to draw, too. To make things with his hands.

"I'm glad that you and Father pray together." She says it as politely as she can. "Kevin, some things have happened, and Father asked me to take you to New York with me for a while. He and Mom have to go somewhere. But they'll come back just as soon as they can."

More brow furrowing. Tighter, this time. "Where are they going?"

Don't say prison, don't say prison. She forces a smile, and explains, "They have to answer some questions." It's true, at least. SHIELD is definitely going to be asking them a lot of questions.

"Like at Mom's school?"

"Kind of," she allows.

Kevin nods, apparently accepting this. His next question is: "Can I bring my blanket?"

"You can bring whatever you want," she says, and helps him pack his bag. For a six year old, he's surprisingly practical, picking out a few changes of clothes (though not underwear; she finds the drawer and tucks a few pairs into the bag anyway), a couple of stuffed animals, and the original Kevin's baby blanket. She feels her eyes water as she draws it through her hands to fold it. There are ancient chew marks and a couple of stains that didn't come out.

Christ, but her parents had been committed to this fantasy.

She wipes her eyes surreptitiously and tucks the blanket in the bag, then stops before she zips it up. "Do you want to bring any of your books?"

"No," is Kevin's reply. "It's summer. Nobody does homework in summer."

She's going to have to figure out a way to get him enrolled in school, she realizes. Which means she's going to have to move to an apartment near good schools, and probably out of Hell's Kitchen entirely.

Technically, with the Bulletin salary, she _can_ do it, as long as she's not too ambitious. But it's just another thing to stress about and arrange.

Karen picks up the bright red duffel, with Kevin's name written on one end, and puts the other worries out of her mind.

"Frank, we're coming down," she calls as she heads down the stairs. It's Frank's cue to hopefully not be holding a gun to her mother's head when she and Kevin head down the stairs.

He isn't. Her parents are both looking mutinous, like they might start objecting, but Frank is nowhere to be seen as Karen leads Kevin into the main part of the house. Her mother takes a couple of steps forward, but Karen just steers Kevin away. As much as she wants to give him the opportunity to say goodbye, there's just too much chance of the situation going to hell.

Besides, it's probably best for him if he doesn't realize how serious this situation is just yet.

Karen stops on the porch and stares out at the night for a long second. She's almost certain this is the last time she'll see the sky from this particular point in the universe — and just as sure that it's the last time Kevin will see it, too. The sky has turned a deep, velvety blue by now. There's a hazy glow of light pollution from the east, and the stars aren't strong enough to stand out.

She squeezes Kevin's hand. He squeezes back, but she can see him looking back toward Paxton and Penny.

Frank is leaning up against the van with a cell phone pressed to his ear. The MRAD has vanished to wherever he stores his guns within. As she and Kevin draw near, Frank looks over to them and nods. He slides the van door open for them and then heads around toward the driver's seat.

"Who's he?"

"That's Frank. He's… a friend of mine." Karen carefully tucks the little duffel bag in the floor of the van and then helps Kevin with his seatbelt. She crawls into the passenger seat, strapping herself in, though with an eye on her brother. He looks out at the van's solid side door, and then at the other. Noticing, even if he doesn't understand the significance, that there are no windows.

* * *

The roads are dark and wooded, with no streetlights. She watches as they return to the little state highway that they'd driven down to get to her family's cabin. Watches the race of the yellow and white lines, hard for her to spot in the dark, even with the headlights on. It's summer, she reminds herself, and tries not to think of the wood she'd driven through that cold February night too many years ago, where the snow had turned the roads to chiaroscuro blankness.

The first hint that something is wrong is the flashing blue lights she can see far ahead of them. Frank slows, and she can see his hands tensing around the steering wheel. She feels herself tense.

And then there's the roadblock. Halfway down the scenic highway. Blocking them off well away from the interstate.

There are people in uniforms and tactical gear milling around, and Frank stops the van. They could run, she knows; there have to be at least twelve twisty little roads that lead to other highways, back to the interstate, and surely they haven't all been blocked.

The rest of her is wondering if this is something her parents did, or totally unrelated to them. No way a rural police department — or the National Park service — could get a roadblock like this up this quickly, right?

A man steps up to the window. Not a police officer — no uniform. An eyepatch, and his dark face almost seems to come swimming out of the shadows, strangely lit in the flash-off-flash of the blue lights.

"Director Fury," Frank says, and he sounds like he's just swallowed broken glass, all ragged, every syllable reluctant.

"Good evening, Lieutenant Castle, Ms. Page," says Fury, and the name is familiar, but she can't place how. "I believe we have a few matters to discuss."

The instinct to snap that she has nothing to discuss with him rises, but Frank's tense expression stops her. This is a man who makes Frank cautious. And they're stopped at a roadblock. Probably surrounded.

"I would like to offer you the use of a SHIELD safehouse while we all make the appropriate arrangements. If you accept it, you'll have a SHIELD escort en route." He pauses, and he's not smiling, precisely, but Karen still receives the impression of a predator satisfied with trapped prey. "If not, SHIELD will leave you to negotiate with local law enforcement in peace."

And that will go _swimmingly_.

Frank looks to her. She looks back at him. This is SHIELD, then. This man is the Director of SHIELD. Once again her choice has been made for her.

She doesn't even have to nod. Frank must see her answer in her expression, because he says, in that scraped-raw Punisher voice, "Alright. Yeah. We're grateful for SHIELD assistance."

He doesn't sound grateful. And she doesn't feel it, either, as they follow a black Chevy Suburban with flashing blue lights onto the shoulder, past the roadblock. 

Karen watches the dark roads for a few long moments, and then she turns her head and looks at Kevin. He's resting his head against the side of his chair in an angle that would have her cracking her neck for hours, brassy curls covering one eye. His mouth has turned down as he sleeps, but his breathing is slow and even, and he looks relaxed.

Her heart squeezes at the sight, one right out of dimly remembered family trips and photo albums she'll never be allowed to touch again.

Clone or not, Kevin or not, he's her brother. And the same horrible thoughts that drove her parents to this extreme are so seductive, because she almost allows herself to think that she'll do better this time.

He's her brother, she reminds herself, and he deserves a normal life, without any expectation that he needs to be anyone but who he really is.


End file.
